1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to organization and navigation of digital information objects of a digital information space.
2. Background Art
In a data space containing hypertext such as, for example, the World Wide Web (WWW), authors link to one another's documents or pages. A user navigates through the digital information space by either following these author-defined links, searching for specific terms (as supported by search engines), or through their own “bookmarks” or pointers to specific pages.
Currently, upon locating a document the user may create a bookmark for the document. The user may then edit a description of the document (presumably, why the document is interesting) in the properties of the bookmark.
Several disadvantages are associated with the use of bookmarks for documents. For instance, the user may completely forget the existence of a relevant bookmark. Also, a user may bookmark the same document twice because the user forgot the first visit to the document. Further, some bookmarks properly belong in several categories, but to do this, the user must add the bookmarks separately to each category. If the bookmark is changed later, the user has to update each bookmark separately. Frequently, when reviewing the bookmarks, a user is at a loss as to why a particular document was marked. The collection of bookmarks can rapidly grow to an unmanageable number rendering the bookmarks useless. Bookmarks are also difficult to share among users. Bookmarks fail to offer much interrelated organization amongst them. Finally, all bookmarks must be added manually. Classes of bookmarks do not self-populate and do not offer a superior method of sharing information amongst peers.
In general, the user sees the digital information space as a loosely connected network in which authors link to their own documents, or the documents of other authors. What is needed is a user-driven model of organization and navigation that more closely maps to the operation of human long-term memory and is easily shared between peers using different computers.